Recital 29

Designing settings to ensure a high level of privacy, safety and security is important to minimise online risks for minors by reducing the likelihood of minors being exposed to content, interactions or functionalities that may be harmful, including in circumstances where children are unregistered on the service. To this end, providers of online social networking services and of video-sharing platform services should ensure that settings, such as those that allow tracking recipients of the service or locating them, enabling access to microphone, contacts and camera, or recommending other accounts to minors are off by default for minors. When enabled, some particularly privacy-sensitive settings, such as access to location, should be turned off after the session ends, and in any case, minors should always be made aware when activated. Furthermore, push notifications should be turned off by default and should be designed in a way that does not impair minors sleep needs and school time. To this end, push notifications should never be sent to children during their school time and core sleep hours, with the exception of where such notifications stem from urgent security alerts – for example related to account security - or interactions with their guardians. Push notifications are notifications that appear on a device to inform the recipient of the service of ongoing activities on the service regardless of whether the service is actively in use and thereby encouraging users to continue the use of the service. Additionally, where some settings and features may be particularly harmful to minors, providers should make them inaccessible for minors. Such harmful features can be filters impairing minors’ mental well-being for example by disproportionately embellishing, distorting or idealizing a child’s image – excluding harmless filters such as those mimicking animals – as well as features increasing social comparison such enabling children to see the numbers of reactions on their content.